Michelle Brown, a Latina educator who holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from Butler University, and an M.A. in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, founded CommonLit as an education technology non-profit in 2014. CommonLit was inspired by Michelle’s experience teaching English in a high-poverty school in rural Mississippi. It is the tool she wishes she had – free, highly effective, and easy to use.

Under Michelle’s leadership, CommonLit has grown to be a beloved staple of reading and writing instruction for 1 million teachers and 30 million registered students in the U.S. and Latin America. In April 2020, Bill Gates named
CommonLit as a top tool for learning during the pandemic.

Today, Michelle leads a passionate multidisciplinary team of ~100 full time employees with an ambitious aim to close persistent opportunity gaps in literacy education. She has raised over $30M for CommonLit from Bill & Melinda Gates, Jack Dorsey, CZI, Ben Chestnut, The Robin Hood Foundation, The Overdeck Family Foundation, Epic Foundation, NSVF, Cisco, AT&T, Google.org, and more. In
2015, Michelle was winner of the national Teach For America Social Innovation Award. In 2019, Michelle was recognized as the winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the mid Atlantic region.